Botometer

There’s more than just fake news out there, there are also Twitter bots and fake product reviews. I have a couple links to help with both of these.

First, if you see a suspicious Twitter account (suspicious maybe because all it does is post weird political memes 24/7, for example), you can check it at Botometer. It can tell you how probable it is that a particular account is a bot rather than a fellow human. It can also check followers (of your own or another account) to see which might be more likely to be bots. I don’t know how practical it is for large-scale bot-detecting, but it’s a fun little tool if you see an account you think might be fake.

Another handy website is Fakespot. Fakespot can tell you how reliable the reviews for a particular product is. It covers Amazon, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and the Apple App store. So, for instance, if you are searching for bluetooth headphones on Amazon, you might, like me, sort the results by the highest rating. Then the top of the list is a brand you’ve never heard of, so you can plug it into Fakespot and find out if those reviews are really reliable. If it looks like the assessment below, then you know you probably need to keep looking:

I’ve noticed that electronics (especially those with brand names I’ve never heard in my life) are especially notorious for fake reviews.

If you see results more like this, though, you know the reviews are more legit: